Daily Log

Didn't really come up with any Weekend Roundup today. Was distracted
during the day working on Carola Dibbell's new website. Then made dinner.
But mostly the links weren't coming -- not that I couldn't come up with
yet another Israel section. One thing that's slowing me down is that my
Firefox browser periodically crashes (as it did today -- I was able to
"restore session" today, but a crash earlier in the week left me having
to repopulate all my tabs by hand).

Started collecting these tweets during the week. Not enough here for
a post.

Music Week

The high rated count comes from hustling for last week's
Rhapsody Streamnotes.
More generally, I'm trying to sort out year-end lists -- the working
files are here for
jazz and
non-jazz. By some
quirk of fate, both lists currently have 55 A-list albums. I think
in past years I've had a fair amount more records in the jazz column,
but I'm getting less and less jazz these days. For instance, Tim Niland,
whose blog a few years back ran very parallel to mine, posted his Jazz
Critics Poll ballot
today, and his top-ten includes four records I haven't heard (John
Zorn, Audio One, Lean Left, and Brandon Seabrook), and two more I didn't
receive (Chicago Underground Duo, Raoul Björkenheim).

I haven't seen much else in the way of year-end lists, although they
should start appearing any day now (indeed: Mojo: Beck, War on
Drugs, Sleaford Mods, Jack White, St. Vincent, Steve Gunn; Q:
War on Drugs, Alt-J, Damon Albarn, Manic Street Preachers, Beck, St.
Vincent; American Songwriter: Sturgill Simpson, War on Drugs,
Strand of Oaks, Taylor Swift, Ryan Adams, Hurray for the Riff Raff,
St. Vincent at 21). Still don't have a plan on how to do a year-end
list metacritic file, but thinking about it.

Did some resorting on the year-end lists, resulting in a couple
of grade promotions. I'm not able to find time to play many of my
favorite records after rating, but Revolutionary Snake Ensemble and
Jenny Scheinman have been exceptions.

The New Basement Tapes: Lost on the River (2014, Island): T-Bone's friends add music to Dylan lyrics, the last gasp of a Woody Guthrie wannabe [r]: B+(*)

Sam Newsome: The Straight Horn of Africa: A Path to Liberation [The Art of the Soprano, Vol. 2] (2014, self-released): more art of the soprano, helped by drums and good humor ("Good Golly Miss Mali") [cd]: A-

Weekend Roundup

This week's notable links follow, especially on Israel, where this
summer's Gaza war and the coming elections, on top of nearly twenty
years of Likud rule (minus two years for Ehud Barak, 1998-2000) and
far-right demagoguery have left a great many Israelis more racist
and bloodthirsty than ever. When I talk to people about Israel, they
usually throw their hands up in the air, but this is important --
not least because the US is becoming increasingly Israelized, as
you can see from Obama's latest escalations in Afghanistan, Iraq,
and Syria, and as is portended by the Confederate/Tea Party revolt --
the lynchings the latter dream about are now real in Israel.

The financialization revolution over the past thirty-five years has moved
us toward greater inequality in three distinct ways. The first involves
moving a larger share of the total national wealth into the hands of the
financial sector. The second involves concentrating on activities that
are of questionable value, or even detrimental to the economy as a whole.
And finally, finance has increased inequality by convincing corporate
executives and asset managers that corporations must be judged not by
the quality of their products and workforce but by one thing only:
immediate income paid to shareholders. [ . . . ]

But the most important change will be intellectual: we must come
to understand our economy not as simply a vehicle for capital owners,
but rather as the creation of all of us, a common endeavor that creates
space for innovation, risk taking, and a stronger workforce. This change
will be difficult, as we will have to alter how we approach the economy
as a whole. Our wealth and companies can't just be strip-mined for a
small sliver of capital holders; we'll need to bring the corporation
back to the public realm. But without it, we will remain trapped inside
an economy that only works for a select few.

By now it should be clear that giving in to the Republicans does not
"pave the way" for future compromises -- that's the Lucy-with-the-football
lesson that President Obama has spent his entire term in office learning.
Much more fundamentally, though, the problem is this: you can't cut
carbon without, you know, cutting carbon.

The president's accord with China doesn't actually do anything except
set a target. To meet that target you have to do things. If you don't do
things -- if you keep approving pipelines and coal mines and fracking
wells -- then you won't meet the target.

For the moment, Keystone is the best example of this principle. So
far we've stopped it for three years, and in the process pushed companies
to pull $17 billion in investment out of the tar sands. That money would
have built projects that would have dumped the carbon equivalent of 700
new coal-fired power plants into the atmosphere. We've done something
real -- something that will actually help, say, Delaware which has a,
you know, coastline.

Israel links: There's been a steady stream of reports of
communal violence between Israelis (especially West Bank and Jerusalem
settlers) and Palestinians, which might seem to be symmetrical except
for the Israeli state, which holds a practical monopoly on violence
and directs it at Palestinians. The number of incidents of attacks by
Palestinians against Israelis (an errant car here, a stabbing there,
five killed in a Jewish synagogue) has triggered speculation that a third
Intifada is in the works. Like the first two, all a third will prove
is how intransigent and unengaging Israeli politics has become -- an
old story where pent-up frustration gets the best of caution, even
knowing that Israel will take every provocation as an excuse for ever
greater violence. However, what is different this time is the degree
that Israeli civilians have taken the lead in attacking Palestinians,
both violently and economically through their campaign to rid Jewish
businesses of Palestinian workers. This is happening partly due to
the unchecked racism in Israeli political discourse, and to the loss
of restraint in Israel's legal system. So the question this time isn't
whether there will be an intifada but why there is already a pogrom --
a state-backed civilian riot against a hated ethnic minority.

Kate: Israeli government plans 185 miles of new Jewish settler roads in
the West Bank: That's just one of dozens of press reports: Israel
to approve 200 units in Jerusalem settlement; Palestinian shot dead by
Israeli forces in al-Arrub; Palestinian worker shot dead in Israel;
Body of Palestinian man found with signs of torture; Soldier stabbed
in Tel Aviv dies; Palestinian suspect shot; Israeli forces open live
fire at Palestinians during clashes [in Bethlehem]; 58 Palestinians
kidnapped in various Arab towns; Israeli settlers torch mosque in
Ramallah-area village; Israeli settlers accost Palestinian officers
near Nablus; Gun-toting settlers attack female students near Bethlehem;
Jews threaten to kill head teacher for having Arab workers at school.
Also a
link about the Rasmea Odeh case which shows that Israeli injustice
is practiced even in Chicago.

Kate: Hate attacks in Jerusalem and Israel include one by settler girls:
Also: Palestinian woman run over by Israeli near Shu'fat; 2 Israelis
stabbed in fight with Palestinians in East Jerusalem; Child seriously
injured during interrogation in Jerusalem; Vandals deface car of Acre
imam who called for tolerance after J'lem attack. It was also the 20th
anniversary of Baruch Goldstein's massacre of 56 worshippers at the
Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron -- often cited as the pivotal event that
wrecked the Oslo Peace Process. Goldstein died during the attack, and
has been treated as a martyr: "At his funeral, Goldstein was eulogized
as a hero, with one speaker, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, declaring that even
1 million Arabs 'are not worth a Jewish fingernail,' while attendees
shouted, 'We are all Goldsteins!' and 'Arabs out of Israel!' Following
the slaughter, Goldstein was also lauded by Rabbi Dov Lior, who was
and continues to be the chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba and one of the most
influential figures in the religious Zionism movement, who called
Goldstein, 'holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust.'" And many
more reports along these lines.

Annie Robbins: Kahanists attack school after synagogue killings:
In Hebron, where the martyred murderer Goldstein is buried, so I
figure the "provocation" was merely convenient. Nor was that the
only case of settler violence reported here: "And speaking of
stories that the mainstream is not covering, Yusuf Hasan al-Ramouni,
32, a Palestinian husband, father, son, and brother was lynched
Sunday in a bus in Mount Scopus, which adjoins Jewish settlements
in East Jerusalem." Robbins also has
videos of Israeli forces spraying "skunk spray" in Palestinian
neighborhoods.

Gideon Levy: In Israel, only Jewish blood shocks anyone: In Israel,
five Israelis killed in a Jerusalem synagogue is a world-class outrage,
but 2200 Palestinians killed in Gaza is a statistic. "But this is a
society that sanctifies its dead to the point of death-worship, that
wears thin the stories of the victims' lives and deaths, whether it be
in a synagogue attack or a Nepal avalanche. It's a society preoccupied
with endless commemorations in the land of monuments, services and
anniversary ceremonies; a society that demands shock and condemnation
after every attack, when it blames the entire world."

Jeff Halper: Israel sows despair and senseless violence: "And the
'Zionist answer' to the downward cycle of senseless violence in which
Jerusalem finds itself: house demolitions, mass arrests, revoking the
'residency' of native-born Jerusalemites, closing Palestinian neighborhoods
with concrete blocks, arming Israeli Jewish vigilantes and cheap shots
at the last person who believes in a two-state solution, Abu Mazen.
Everything, that is, except an end to occupation and a just political
solution. This is what happens when a powerful country forgoes any
effort to address the grievances of a people under its control and
descends into raw oppression."

Isabel Kershner: Israeli Cabinet Approves Nationality Bill: Could
use more detail here, but the legislation appears to be aimed at stripping
rights away from "Arab citizens of Israel," including citizenship in some
cases. Intriguing sentence: "In what appeared to be a political deal, Mr.
Netanyahu promised government support for the hard-line versions of the
bill in a first reading in Parliament this week on the condition that the
law would be moderated before any final approval."

William Saletan: Hate Thy Neighbor: Subtitle: "How Israel teaches its
citizens all the wrong lessons." For instance, there's the policy of
demolishing the homes of the families of already-killed "terrorists":
"In other words, the logic of the policy is that it punishes people who
don't commit acts of terror. Terrorists want to die, so they aren't
deterred. Israel targets their loved ones, who would suffer more acutely,
in the hope that this "price" will intimidate the would-be perpetrator.
That is the logic of hostage taking, and of terrorism."

Michael Wilner: Cornered but unbound by nuclear pact, Israel reconsiders
military action against Iran: So the sabre-rattling resumes, just
as the US and Iran are putting the finishing touches on a deal promising
to return Iran to the good graces of the NPT, certified as a state that
is not developing nuclear weapons. Of course, Netanyahu wants to torpedo
that deal (and is probably expecting the Republican congress to do his
dirty work for him -- after all, they were elected precisely for their
inability to think independently). He also no doubt wants to bring up
the spectre of Iran any time the US suggests he negotiate peace with
the Palestinians. But wasn't it just a few months ago when he admitted
that his last round of sabre-rattling was nothing more than a scam to
hustle the dumb Americans, and that Israel never had any intention of
attacking Iran in the first place?

I also want to single out
Richard Silverstein: Terror Rules Jerusalem: He points out that the
"heinous synagogue terror attack by Palestinians in the West Jerusalem
neighborhood of Har Hof" took place on grounds of the former Palestinian
village of Deir Yassin, "where the Irgun murdered 100 Palestinians as
part of the pre-war (1948) violence that eventually led to the Nakba,"
adding "It's horrible to think that this single place could be the site
of two such tragedies." He doesn't mention that the ratio of dead is
close to the historical norm for matched sets of Israeli and Palestinian
massacres. He then quotes
Jerry Haber:

In the next few days, after the IDF and the settlers will have taken
their vengeance, under the Orwellian cover of "deterrence," life will
go on. The settlers who commit price-tag attacks will be condemned
for a day, then understood, then arrested, maybe, convicted maybe,
and pardoned, probably. The soldiers and police will do whatever they
want with impunity, B'tselem cameras or not. Land will be expropriated,
freedoms eliminated, the matrix of control and, most of all, the routine
will continue until the next time, when Jews die, and the clueless
Israelis hold everybody and everything but themselves responsible.

Silverstein then moves on to the death of Yusuf Al-Ramuni, who was
found hung in an egged bus he drove. The Israelis promptly declared
the death a suicide, although there is evidence that he was lynched.

Further, in the media rush to cover the horrific attack on the Har Nof
synagogue, let's not forget that this incident preceded it. Terror
always has a context. Do not forget that no matter how heinous an
event, something equally heinous preceded and incited it.

While the world justifiably gasps at an attack on a Jewish house of
worship, let's remember that Palestinians see their own mosques and
cemeteries torched and desecrated by settler price taggers. They see
hundreds of heavily armed Israeli Police defiling the sacred precinct
of Haram Al Sharif. Does anyone believe that a Muslim is not as
horrified by this encroachment as a Jew is by an assault on praying
Jews?

It takes two, and Palestinian rage derives from Israeli provocation.
Certainly, the settlers who murder Palestinians believe the converse.
So why not credit Palestinian rage as much as Israeli?
[ . . . ]

Examine once again Bibi's response to the Kafr Kana police murder.
He dispensed with rote regret altogether. He launched into barely
controlled rage at Palestinian protests against this cold-blooded
murder and warned they would be "dealt with" severely if they didn't
learn to behave themselves.

Bibi doesn't mind the current level of civil unrest. It plays into
his hand for upcoming elections, and this is literally all he cares
about. Israelis flock to the strong man, even if he's utterly unable
to stifle Palestinian terror. The problem will be that Bibi will win
an election, but have no more idea how to quell the rebellion after
the election than he does now.

Silverstein thinks a Third Intifada is already here, "but unlike
the earlier Intifades, this one is a mutual affair in which Jewish
terror (whether official and State-sponsored or vigilante-based)
responds to Palestinian terror (or vice versa)." Actually, he
forgets the overwhelming preponderance of Israeli violence in
both previous Intifadas -- a term which gives Palestinians more
strategic credit than they deserve. (In fact, I've long argued
that the second Intifada should have been named for Shaul Moffaz,
the man who started it, and looking back Pogrom might have been
more accurate; looking forward it certainly will be.)

You might also read Silverstein's later post,
In Race for Next Shin Bet Chief, May Worst Man Win. In the US we're
so used to voting for "lesser evils" that the "may worst man win" notion
is not just alien, it's downright terrifying. Ever since the German CP
really did let the worst man win, we've been popular frontists -- partly
because the world has never been so vile, nor the hope for revolution so
sweet, to let the world crash so dismally. (The right, on the other hand,
with its distorted vision and messianic fervor, has often done just that.)
On the other hand, Silverstein has become so pessimistic about Israel that
the only chance he sees is complete breakdown. It's a scary argument.

Also, the US war machine is heating up: If Republicans
want to pick a fight over the arbitrary, unilateral abuse of presidential
power, they're welcome to start here:

Mark Mazzetti/Eric Schmidt: In a Shift, Obama Extends US Role in Afghan
Conflict: "Obama's order allows American forces to carry out missions
against the Taliban and other militant groups threatening American troops
or the Afghan government, a broader mission than the president described
to the public earlier this year, according to several administration,
military and congressional officials with knowledge of the decision. The
new authorization also allows American jets, bombers and drones to support
Afghan troops on combat missions."

Andrew Bacevich: Daydream Believers: Disposes of five key myths
Washington insiders believe only as a matter of faith (and in many
cases their jobs), since the facts clearly don't support them: "The
presence of US forces in the Islamic world contributes to regional
stability and enhances American influence; The Persian Gulf constitutes
a vital US national security interest; Egypt and Saudi Arabia are valued
and valuable American allies; The interests of the United States and
Israel align; Terrorism poses an existential threat that the United
States must defeat."

It's important to be clear what this does NOT mean -- it doesn't mean
that there is a huge hidden burden on the public. For the most part,
people buying health insurance would have bought it anyway. Under
single-payer, they would have stopped doing that, and paid taxes
instead; under the ACA, they continue to pay premiums but don't pay
the extra taxes. There's no secret extra cost.

So, why was Obamacare set up this way? It's mainly about politics,
but nothing that should shock you. Partly it was about getting buy-in
from the insurance industry; a switch to single payer would have
destroyed a powerful industry, and realistically that wasn't going
to happen. Partly it was about leaving most people unaffected:
employment-based coverage, which was the great bulk of private
insurance, remained pretty much as it was. This made sense: even
if single-payer would have been better than what people already had,
it would have been very hard to sell them on such a big change. And
yes, avoiding a huge increase in on-budget spending was a consideration,
but not central.

The main point was to make the plan incremental, supplementing the
existing structure rather than creating massive changes. And all of
this was completely upfront; I know I wrote about it many times.

Most single-payer advocates will counter that the health insurance
industry deserved to be destroyed. Of course, I agree, and would like
to go further in nationalizing health care -- the insurance industry
isn't the only sector that rips the public off, even if it is unique
in how little value it adds to the system. However, if the obstacle to
single-payer is the political power of the health insurance industry,
it would be worthwhile looking at reforms to ACA that would knock that
industry down a notch or two. The "public option," which was a key
part of the original act, was one: this would weaken the industry in
two ways: by drawing customers away, and by reducing profit margins
through tougher competition.

I suspect the main source of opposition to the ACA is the kneejerk
belief common on the right that prefers policy made by profit-seeking
private companies over the public-servants of government bureaucracies.
It's hard to see why anyone should believe that, but sometimes business
doesn't cut its own throat, and sometimes government does.

The mind reels. How is it possible for anyone who has been following
politics and, presumably, policy for the past six years not to know
that Obamacare is, in all important respects, identical to Romneycare?
It has the same three key provisions -- nondiscrimination by insurers,
a mandate for individuals, and subsidies to make the mandate workable.
It was developed by the same people. I and many others have frequently
referred to ObamaRomneycare.

Well, I've know for years that many political pundits don't think
that understanding policy is part of their job. But this is still extreme.
And I'm sorry to go after an individual here -- but for God's sake, don't
you have to know something about the actual content of a policy you
critique?

And what's actually going on here is worse than ignorance. It's pretty
clear that we're watching a rule of thumb according to which if Republicans
are against a proposal, that means it must be leftist and extreme, and the
burden on the White House is to find a way to make the GOP happy. Needless
to say, this rewards obstructionism -- there is literally nothing Obama can
do to convince some (many) pundits that he's making a good faith effort,
because they don't pay any attention to what he does, only to the Republican
reaction.

Nancy Le Tourneau: Understanding the Threat of a Confederate Insurgency:
Starts with a long quote from Doug Muder's
Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party, which makes the point that the
first war the US lost was the Civil War -- not in 1865, when the Confederate
Army was disbanded, but by 1877, when Reconstruction ended with the restoration
of the Confederate aristocracy, setting the stage for Jim Crow and all that.
If I understand LeTourneau correctly, she's arguing that the explosion of
neo-Confederates is a last-ditch reaction against change -- something more
likely to be a sporadic nuisance than a gathering wave. Nonetheless, the
ability of the right to resist and even roll back reform is a repeated
theme in American history, and we're seeing way too much of it now.

Rhapsody Streamnotes (November 2014)

Music Week

Rated count topped 24,000 this week. It passed 23,000 the week of
March 24, 2014, a bit less than eight months ago. That probably means
June-July, 2015 for 25,000, although I wouldn't be surprised if I
started to slow down. New records are down at least a hundred this
year.

Francis Davis has arranged with NPR to keep his Jazz Critics Poll
going for another year. Ballots have been sent out, and I have one.
Even though I've listened to close to 500 new jazz albums this year,
I have virtually no idea who the leading candidates are this year,
let alone who will win. I barely even have a sense of who I might
vote for, and that's after I went to the trouble to split out my
2014-in-progress file into two
more presentable year-end lists: one for
Jazz and another for
Non-Jazz. Each
picks up (at least initially) the text and cover scan from Rhapsody
Streamnotes. As I was doing this, the first thing that occurred to
me was my haphazard insertions into the list throughout the year
are far from adding up to a sort. Before I declare anything even
tentatively official -- the Jazz Critics Poll deadline is December
7 -- I expect to do a lot of resorting.

I still need to do quite a bit of work on the files. I'll
probably reorganize them to reflect Davis' revised rules on
reissue/historical. (I've moved a couple records over, but not
all of them.) I also need to go back and dig up December (or
post-Thanksgiving) 2013 releases, since they weren't available
early enough for last year's premature ballots). Then there
is the "prospect" list in the notes: technically, any record
I'm aware of existing that I think might have a 2% (or greater)
chance of panning out into an A-list release. This involves
looking at the
prospect file and various
other resources.

Much more unpacking than usual this week, but nothing I'm
especially looking forward to. (It occurs to me that David
Friesen must be one of the best-regarded jazz musicians I've
never listened to an album by, and now I got a double. Only
four more names strike me as familiar, and they're not all
that memorable.)

By the way, the Fred McDowell album popped up as a new digital
dump, but I cited the older CD. I found the Ross Johnson set when
I was looking for something newer (though probably still old) by
him, and got curious.

The draft file for Rhapsody Streamnotes has about 80 records
in it now. I expect I'll post it later this week, then probably
do two in December as the 2014 year-end lists appear. (I will
say that the two leading candidates there are St. Vincent and
War on Drugs, and while neither made my A-list, neither is
totally undeserving either.)

Daily Log

Laura wrote a draft "letter to the editor":

A recent letter seems to think that Hamas seized power in Gaza and
this gives Israel has the right to kill Palestinians in
Gaza. Regardless of the repressive and violent nature of Hamas, this
idea is false. In 2006 the Palestinians, encouraged by the US, held an
election. This is under occupation, don't forget. Hamas got the most
votes, not because people wanted to kill Israelis, but because they
were rejecting Fatah, which had shown itself to be corrupt and
ineffective in opposing Israel's occupation. Israel and the US decided
this was not to their liking, so they instigated Fatah's violent
attempt to take over in Gaza in 2007.But Hamas defeated this coup
attempt and remained in power, so a displeased Israel, which already
controlled the borders, airspace and seacoast of Gaza, instituted an
even more draconian system by blockading Gaza. This is collective
punishment pure and simple, and civilized people should not support
that.

She asked me to fact-check her assertions, so I wrote back:

The facts as I know them (do with them what you will):

In 1947 the UN proposed dividing Palestine into two separate
countries, one Jewish (Israel), the other Arab (Palestine). One of
three disconnected Palestinian territories was the Gaza Strip. By
1949, when Israel signed an armistice with Egypt, the Gaza Strip had
been reduced in size by about half, and its population more than
doubled with refugees from Israeli territory. Egypt administered Gaza
until 1967, when Israel invaded and placed Gaza under military law
(occupation). In 1993, Israel signed the Oslo Accords, and as stage
one gave limited administration of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority
(PA), led at the time by Fatah chairman Yasser Arafat. Fatah was a
secular party -- it included both Christians and Muslims -- and had
long been the dominant political faction within the PLO (Palestinian
Liberation Organization). After Arafat died in 2004, a presidential
election was held in 2005 and won by Arafat's deputy, Mahmoud
Abbas. When legislative elections were held in 2006, Fatah was
challenged by Hamas -- a social welfare group founded in 1987, aligned
with the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas had originally bee supported by
Israel as an alternative to Fatah, but after the PA was established
Hamas became more militant and Israel started to target Hamas
leaders. leading to a cycle of terrorism, especially in the years
2001-03 when Ariel Sharon became Prime Minister of Israel and
destroyed any chance that the "peace process" would result in separate
Israeli and Palestinian states. The end of the "peace process," the
death of Arafat, and the widespread perception that Abbas and other
Fatah leaders were corrupt resulted in a victory for Hamas in the 2006
legislative elections. However, Israel and Bush rejected the results
of a clearly democratic election, and conspired with Fatah officials
to seize power in a coup. Their effort was successful in the West
Bank, but was rebuffed by Hamas in Gaza. Israel, which continued to
control the borders to Gaza (as they had since 1967) then locked those
borders down in an attempt to "put Gaza on a diet" -- to starve Hamas
into submission. Hamas, in turn, has tried various strategies to work
around Israel's blockade, ranging from digging tunnels to smuggle
goods from Egypt to firing small rockets over Israel's border wall to
declaring truces (the Arabic term is "hudna"), which are invariably
terminated by Israeli shelling or bombing. Israel has in turn at
various times loosened or tightened the blockade, and has launched
four large-scale punitive wars against Gaza (in 2006, 2008, 2012, and
2014) -- the latest killed over 2000 Palestinians -- and numerous
smaller-scale attacks. The 2014 war was largely occasioned by an
agreement between Fatah and Hamas to reunify the PA government (under
Fatah leadership but with Hamas participation). If Israel had any
desire to negotiate fair peace terms they would welcome a unified
leadership of the two major factions within Palestinian politics;
indeed, they would have recognized whatever leadership Palestinians
democratically chose to represent them. Clearly, Israel's current
leaders have no desire for peace, nor do they have any respect for
US-led peace efforts.

Also made a half-recipe of pita bread (8 pieces), using 1/2 cup of
whole wheat flower. Forgot to serve the yogurt with cucumber. Rannfrid
made Turkish coffee to go with dessert. People generally avoided the
chicken -- I shouldn't have scaled the recipe up, not just because I
had more than half left over but because the quantity piled up so many
pieces didn't brown (they were fully cooked and the uncrisp skin was
still flavorful). The pita was the first to go, and the meatballs got
plucked out of the sauce. I forgot to use the saffron with the pears,
so they didn't have the brilliant yellow look of the picture. (I bought
six bartlett pears, figuring I'd scale the recipe up so each person
would get one-half pear, then I bought three bosc pears, and decided
to use them instead, so the serving size was 1/4 pear.) Someone took
some pictures, but I don't have them.

Random Thoughts on World War I

I attended a talk given by Gretchen Eick on World War I, which
got me to thinking. Much of what I heard there was familiar to me,
although one point that wasn't was the extent of British efforts
to mold public opinion in the US in favor of entering the war. So
what I'm doing below isn't trying to recapitulate Eick so much as
marshall what little I do know about the war.

It was called the Great War at the time, which suits it more
than being demoted to a mere preview of WWII. I'll go with that name
here.

For one thing, the first world war was probably the Seven Years'
War of 1756-63, fought principally between Great Britain, France, and
Spain for colonial possessions on several continents, although it also
involved Sweden, Prussia, Austria, Russia, Portugal, and others, and
included anticolonial elements (in America it is remembered as the
French and Indian War, and it was a close precursor of the War for
Independence in 1776 -- much as WWII catalyzed the War for Independence
in Vietnam).

For another, the phrase "Great War" provides a flavor of the
time. The war was the logical (if not necessary) culmination of the
two great themes of the previous century-plus: the rise of nation
states (greatly accelerated by the unification of Germany and Italy),
and Europe's imperial domination of the rest of the world. Most of
the states that fought the war had through their empires achieved
unprecedented levels of greatness -- Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman
Empire were declining exceptions, their fears and envy proving the
point.

Arno Mayer coined the term "The Thirty-Years War of the 20th
Century" to bind the two world wars into a single, more coherent
entity -- one that both binds the two major wars together and helps
to sweep up numerous related conflicts between the bookends (e.g.,
the Russian Civil War, the Greek-Turkish War, Italy's invasion of
Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, Japan's grab of Manchuria). The
seeds of the later war were planted in the settlement of the first:
not so much because Germany was treated harshly, although that was
part of the problem, as because the war failed to convince both
sides of the folly and futility of empire.

The Great War was greeted by an outpouring of mass patriotic
fervor, something unprecedented and, as the grim realities of 20th
century warfare set in, never again repeated. Both sides expected
a quick and favorable, even painless, result, as they had become
accustomed to in their military encounters with Africans and Asians.
Europe's subjugation of Asia-Africa had swollen heads with racism,
matching their embrace of national identity.

David Fromkin, in Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great
War in 1914?, blames Germany for starting the war. There is little
reason to believe that Austria-Hungary would have declared war on Serbia
without Germany's backing, so that decision rested more in Berlin than
in Vienna. The Junker aristocracy that controlled Germany's military
argued that war with Russia was inevitable, and that Germany should
attack now rather than wait for Russia to modernize and grow more
powerful.

One reason Germany was so confident was the War of 1870, when
a Prussian-led North German Confederation easily defeated France,
seizing Alsace-Lorraine as booty and in the process unifying Germany
into a single modern nation-state. Since then Germany grabbed a
handful of territories in Africa and islands in the Pacific, but
all the prime colonies had been grabbed by other powers, so further
German expansion would have to come at the expense of others. To
that end, Germany built up a navy to rival Britain's, but the most
obvious target (and clearest rival) was Russia, with its long land
border snug up against Germany.

Russia expanded steadily from 1550 up to its losing war with
Japan in 1905, fighting the Mongols to the east and south, moving
down the Volga into Ukraine, accreting bits of territory through
numerous wars with the Poles and Turks, racing across Siberia to
the Pacific (and briefly onto Alaska), and in the 19th century
pushing south through the Kazakhs and Uzbeks until their "Great
Game" with Britain stalled. Even beyond their own borders, they
cultivated fellow Slavs in the Balkans and fellow Christians in
the Caucasus and used both as a wedge, ultimately hoping to pry
the Ottomans from Istanbul.

Germany, in turn, sought to thwart Russia by using its largely
dependent ally, Austria-Hungary, to dominate the southern Slavs and
by forging an economic and military alliance with the Ottomans. The
"young Turks" who took over the Ottoman Empire saw the war as a way
to start to reverse two centuries of decline as the various powers
of Europe had picked away one bit of territory after another while
forcing the Ottomans into "capitulations" -- carve-outs of sovereignty
that allowed foreign powers special roles within the Empire (as when
the French became "protectors" of the Maronites of Lebanon.

The Ottoman Empire reached its peak size in 1683 when Austria
repelled the Ottoman army at the Battle of Vienna, although the Empire
had started to weaken earlier. This trend accelerated after 1800, as
nationalism spread and Russia (in the Balkans) and Britain (in Greece)
fomented "national liberation movements" to tear the Ottoman Empire
apart. In the decade before the Great War there were two Balkan Wars
which cost the Ottomans much of their remaining European territory.
During the war the Russians tried to use Armenians and the British
tried to use Arabs to fragment the Ottomans. After the war, Britain
goaded Greece into attacking Turkey: the idea was to expand Greece
to include Greek communities in Asia Minor, but it backfired and
caused those communities to be exiled. The net effect of all the
"national liberation movements" was to create a militant Turkish
nationalism where none had existed before. Turkish nationalism
soon manifested itself was in genocidal attacks on Armenians.

France, of course, was eager to fight Germany to undo the
stain of their loss to Prussia in 1870, and to regain the lost
province of Alsace-Lorraine. They could have avoided the war by
breaking their alliance with Russia.

Great Britain nominally entered the war in defense of Belgian
neutrality, which had been violated when Germany sent troops through
Belgium to attack France. Again, Britain could have backed out of its
alliance with France, or better still inveighed on France to back out
on Russia, limiting the war to a probable stalemate in Eastern Europe,
but they didn't. They were eager to reassert themselves as the world's
dominant navy, and as the Versailles Treaty showed, they expected to
gain most of Germany's territories in Africa and a large chunk of the
Ottoman Empire.

One theory the Great War disproved on day one was that Britain
could maintain peace in Europe by shifting alliances to neutralize
whichever continental power appeared strongest. Britain had followed
that theory for several centuries, and it repeatedly failed, resulting
in wars between Britain and Spain, then France, then Germany, and I
suppose you could add the Cold War against the Soviet Union. (The
balance of powers theory is still championed by Henry Kissinger,
whose track record is no better.)

The Great War quickly developed a reputation for mass slaughter,
widely thought to be a case of new technology overwhelming old tactics.
Indeed, the twenty-five years before the Great War had seen some of
the most dramatic advances of technology ever recorded -- especially,
widespread use of electricity and oil power, the latter so efficient
it could power aircraft. But it could not have been the case that the
destructive potential of that technology was not understood. Much of
the firepower had, after all, been tested in colonial assaults in
Africa and Asia -- for instance, at the 1898 "Battle of Omdurman,"
where the British killed or wounded 23,000 in a single day while
losing only 47 of their own soldiers. The difference was that with
both sides similarly equipped, the expected massacre turned into a
mutual bloodbath -- at Somme in 1916 over one million people were
killed or wounded, which testifies not only to the deadliness of
the technology but to the unprecedented ability of all sides to
raise and deploy armies. Of course, that too was not so new or
surprising, as the Napoleonic Wars of the 1810s and the US Civil
War in the 1860s show.

The first use of poison gas was in the Great War, by Germany
against Russia. France, Britain, and the United States also used
poison gas. It was terrifying but not especially effective -- it
hardly merits being called a "weapon of mass destruction" in the
age of atomic bombs (or for that matter AC-130 gunships) -- and
countermeasures were effective, so it was never again deployed
against enemies capable of responding in kind. Which isn't to say
it was never again used: the British used it in Iraq in 1920 (in
case you ever wondered where Saddam Hussein got the idea).

The overwhelming majority of deaths due to military action
during the Great War were soldiers. By far the largest block of
non-soldiers were Armenians killed in Turkey -- if you leave them
out the ratio of soldiers to civilians goes from four to ten times.
(Civilian deaths due to malnutrition and disease were much higher
but still less than half as many as soldiers killed in war. In
most past wars the opposite is true.) Most battles were fought
away from cities, and aerial bombardment was limited by small and
inefficient planes -- a problem solved in WWII.

On the other hand, the idea that one could blame the masses
for the acts of national leaders, or more nefariously that one could
undermine leaders' resolve by inflicting hardships on the masses,
was in the air, and had, of course, been tested in Africa and Asia.
The most explicit effort was the British blockade of Germany, meant
to starve the German people. (Churchill was reported disappointed
that the war ended before starvation became widespread.) Again, such
practices weren't innovated in WWII so much as perfected.

Nor was genocide invented in the Great War, although it was
vastly scaled up. European colonization had the effect of killing
off huge numbers of natives, especially in the Americas, from the
very beginning (1492), and those numbers sometimes added up to the
extermination of whole tribes. Argentina and Tasmania were totally
depopulated. Within what became the United States native population
was reduced by close to 90%. (Sven Lindqvist covers some of this in
his book, "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey Into
the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide.)
Only some of this was intentional, but incidental slaughter in the
18th and 19th centuries led to directed slaughter in the 20th. The
first widescale instance was directed by Germany against the Herero
in Southwest Africa. During the Great War the Ottoman Empire oversaw
a widespread effort to annihilate Armenians (with estimates up to
1.5 million killed). In WWII, Germany went after the Jews (over 6
million killed).

The United States, which at the time was the world's largest
economic power, entered the Great War in 1917, although it had been
supplying arms, supplies, and financing preferentially to Britain
since the start of the war, often in violation of its own "neutrality"
laws. We tend now to think of the war as a dress rehearsal for WWII,
which profoundly changed the character of the republic, but nearly
all the elements of the change first appeared in the Great War.
Before the war, the US eschewed any sort of foreign entanglements
in war-prone Europe. (The Monroe Doctrine, which later came to be
seen as declaring a zone of American hegemony, was originally just
a threat to warn Europe to stay clear of the Americas and mind its
own business.) Americans also realized that standing armies poised
a threat to democracy, so the US barely had one. (Entering the Great
War, the US had fewer troops in uniform than Bulgaria did.) After
WWII all that changed.

Music Week

Thought the odds I might cross the 24000 rated level this week were
pretty good, but despite a fairly productive week I fell a bit short.
Next week for sure. Probably not tonight. Most likely tomorrow. Just
a number, and in some ways a rather low one. I recall talking to John
Rockwell back in the 1970s when he had twenty-some thousand LPs in his
collection. If he only had the pedestrian habit of keeping lists and
jotting down grades, he could have well over 100,000 by now. I only
started doing this as an aide de memoire in the 1990s, when I had
about 3000 LPs and less than a thousand CDs. However, as so often
happens when you start to measure something, it takes on a life of
its own. I doubt Cap Anson had any clue that he had 3000 hits, nor
that Sam Crawford realized he retired just short (2961). Al Kaline
was conscious enough of his stats that he hung on to get 3007 hits,
but I remember him saying that had he realized that 400 home runs
would have put him into one of those exclusive clubs, he would
have hit more. (He wound up with 399.)

Didn't get any new records this past week -- the three listed
below came today, and two of those have 2015 release dates. I've
had to open 2015 files, not that there is anything interesting
in them yet. The 2014
metafile is currently up to
2615 records (807 rated or owned). I worked a little on it last
week, mostly trying to fill in some missing jazz records -- that
led me to Smoke Sessions, a generally good mainstream label (if
that's your bag).

The Jinx Lennon records are on
Bandcamp. Liam Smith
is a fan, and he turned Robert Christgau onto them, resulting in
last week's
Expert Witness. I (more or less) agree, although I'll add that
I didn't find Lennon's outrage either comforting or cathartic. I
just find so much of what's happening today to be sad and pathetic --
not least because it wouldn't take much intelligence, sensitivity,
and good will to come up with very different outcomes.

I didn't
tweet about the
Jinx Lennon albums, mostly because my own longer write-ups aren't
very coherent. Ideally, I'd take another run at the writing (if
not the albums) before Rhapsody Streamnotes posts (probably next
week rather than this, although I currently have 56 reviews in
the draft file).

Weekend Update

Thought I'd do a quickie on post-election links but I've been so
bummed and lethargic this week it's taken until Sunday anyway. Not
just the elections, either, nor the news that the Supreme Court will
practice its ideological activism on insurance subsidies for people
unfortunate enough to live in states that couldn't (actually, wouldn't)
get their act together under the ACA.

The takeaway from the election seems to be that voter suppression
and nearly infinite money works for Republicans. The 4% "skew" toward
the Democrats that Nate Silver found in the polls seems to be people
who intended to vote but at the last minute either didn't or couldn't.
That was enough to tilt about 5-6 senate races. But also Democrats
didn't do a good job of articulating issues -- it's noteworthy that
progressive issues won pretty much across the board when they weren't
attached to candidates who could be linked to Obama. To pick on one
example: Mark Pryor's campaign consisted of a vacuous slogan ("Put
Arkansas First") and ads warning that Tom Cotton wanted to kill off
Medicare and Social Security. That's not inaccurate, and would have
won if voters really took Cotton to be that much of a threat, but
many voters concluded that the risk wasn't that great. On the other
hand, Cotton's ads did nothing more than equate Pryor with Obama.
I can't tell you why that mattered, or why that worked, but it did.

There are various complex models for this, but the general explanation
is fairly intuitive: Modern economies are built on a mass market. But
if the great majority of people don't have much (or any) disposable
income, then there is no mass market, and it's harder to start a
business relying on any kind of mass sales. And with weak consumer
spending, existing businesses have little reason to invest in growth,
and instead disgorge their profits to shareholders, exacerbating the
trend. In the end, you get a hollowed-out, bifurcated economy, where
low-grade goods are sold to the broke masses on razor-thin margins,
while incomprehensible sums slosh around weird luxury markets.

There's more to it than this. The breakdown of capital controls
makes it easy to reinvest profits abroad, where there is more potential
for middle-class growth. (I first noticed this in the early 1990s,
when Greenspan lowered interest rates to stimulate the economy, and
virtually all of that cheap money went abroad -- mostly, it seemed,
into currency speculation, resulting in busts in East Asia, Mexico,
and elsewhere. Conversely, foreign investors buy up assets in the US --
there was a tremendous boom in this during the 1980s, and while less
commented on the trend continues.)

By the way, I accidentally clicked on a link in Cooper's article
and it led to a fascinating article by J.W. Mason,
Disgorge the Cash:

If you read the business press, you're used to these kinds of stories.
A company whose mission is making something gets bought out or bullied
into becoming a company whose mission is making payments to shareholders.
Apple is only an especially dramatic example. But the familiarity of this
kind of story is a sign of a different relationship between corporations
and the financial system from what prevailed a generation ago.

Prior to the 1980s, share repurchases were tightly limited by law, and
a firm that borrowed in order to pay higher dividends would have been
regarded as engaging in a kind of fraud. Shareholders were entitled to
their dividends and nothing more -- neither a share in any exceptional
profits, nor a say in the management of the firm. In the view of Owen
Young, the long-serving chairman of General Electric in the early 20th
century, "the stockholders are confined to a maximum return equivalent
to a risk premium. The remaining profit stays in the enterprise, is paid
out in higher wages, or is passed on to the customer."

This, of course, has all changed since the 1980s, and it's worth
underscoring that changes in law, and therefore political policy,
were necessary to enable it. Much more of interest here -- I like
the line on the post-WWII corporation: "Whether the managerial firm
was the 'soulful corporation' of Galbraith or the soul-crushing
monopoly capital of Baran and Sweezy, it was run according to its
own growth imperatives, not to maximize returns to shareholders."
Then there's this:

Keynes's call for the "euthanasia of the rentier" toward the end of
The General Theory is typically taken as a playful provocation.
But as Jim Crotty has argued, this idea was one of Keynes's main
preoccupations in his political writings in the 1920s. In his 1926
essay "The End of Laissez Faire," he observed that "one of the most
interesting and unnoticed developments of recent decades has been the
tendency of big enterprise to socialize itself." As shareholders' role
in the enterprise diminishes, "the general stability and reputation of
the institution are more considered by the management than the maximum
of profit for the shareholders." With enough time, the corporations
may evolve into quasi-public institutions like universities, "bodies
whose criterion of action within their own field is solely the public
good as they understand it." Veblen, observing the same developments
but with a less sunny disposition, imagined that the managers of
productive enterprises would eventually tire of "sabotage" by the
notional owners and organize to overthrow them, seizing control of
production as a "Soviet of engineers."

Of course, that never happened, but maybe it should have -- the
"euthanasia of the rentier" if not necessarily the "Soviet of
engineers."

Truth be told, it was never clear how serious Obama ever was about
fighting inequality. Though his big inequality speech marked a step
forward, as many of us noted at the time, it also contained serious
omissions. The economist Max Sawicky observed that much of that
speech didn't actually concern inequality. Rather, it was about
social mobility, which is something entirely different.

Writer Anat Shenker-Osorio pointed out that perhaps the most
glaring omission of all in Obama's inequality speech was a simple one:
a villain. To hear Obama and the Democrats tell it, inequality is
something that just happened. An awful lot of sentences in Obama's
speech used passive voice constructions -- phrases like "the deck
is stacked," "taxes were slashed," and so on. His speech failed to
craft any compelling narrative about exactly who did what to whom.
Inequality remained an abstract concept.

The timidity of Obama's rhetoric -- a faintness of heart that
extends to many other Dems -- stands in sharp contrast to the
talking points of many Republicans. Right-wing populists consistently
point the finger at a rogues' gallery of liberal elitists, government
bureaucrats, and the like. In the past, not only did economically
progressive presidents vilify the plutocratic enemies of the American
people, but they went about it with a certain gusto. Theodore Roosevelt
issued thundering denunciations against "malefactors of great wealth."
In his "I welcome their hatred" speech, FDR attacked as "tyrants" the
"employers and politicians and publishers" who opposed the pro-labor
policies of the New Deal.

But today's Democratic Party is a different animal. By default,
Democrats are the party of working Americans, and sometimes they do
pass legislation that helps the majority. But they are also deeply
corrupted by their own corporate ties. The Democrats' anti-equality
agenda is a case in point. The party supports some admirable policies
targeted at helping low-income Americans -- like raising the minimum
wage, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, and universal pre-K.
But party leaders are far more ambivalent about policies that challenge
the one percent and the power of capital -- stricter financial regulations,
cracking down on CEO pay, a return to confiscatory income tax rates, fair
trade, and intellectual property reform. Unless we rein in the wealth and
power of the one percent, inequality will continue to spiral out of control.

Meanwhile, a quick hit.
Matt O'Brien has a lot of fun with Paul Singer, a billionaire inflation
truther who is sure that the books are cooked because of what he can see
with his own eyes:

. . . check out London, Manhattan, Aspen and East Hampton real
estate prices, as well as high-end art prices, to see what the leading
edge of hyperinflation could look like

Hyperinflation in the Hamptons; hard to beat that for comedy, although
Matt adds value with the Billionaires Price Index.

Actually, I noticed this long ago (so long it certainly doesn't suggest
Weimar- or Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation). When workers' wages rise, we
worry about inflation, assuming those rises will be factored into future
prices (because, heaven forbid, they can't possibly come out of profits).
On the other hand, when asset prices rise, we assume they're finding their
true value, even though the 2008 collapse of the housing bubble shows us
that there is no such thing. That all seems awfully convenient for asset
holders (and damn unfortunate for wage earners). But doesn't basic economic
theory tell us that prices reflect the balance of supply and demand? When
demand goes up relative to supply, prices rise -- and how is that different
from inflation? We happen to live in a world where the rich is getting so
much richer so fast that there simply isn't enough rich-folk-goods (Hamptons
real estate, high-end art) to go around, so of course they bid up, and
therefore inflate, the prices. That's really all there is to the bubble
in Hamptons real estate. And the corrollary to that is that a lot of very
rich people currently own assets that aren't really worth anything like
they think: there is a substantial real transfer of wealth going on from
the 99% to the 1%, but also this asset inflation bubble. If, say, there
was a serious effort to rein in the super rich -- increasing income (and
capital gains) taxes up toward 70%, regulating hedge funds and other
rentiers out of business -- that asset bubble would collapse.

Krugman makes other good points, but the best come from this
golden oldie by Molly Ivins (from 1995, on Rush Limbaugh, but
how little has changed?).

Psychologists often tell us there is a great deal of displaced anger
in our emotional lives -- your dad wallops you, but he's too big to
hit back, so you go clobber your little brother. Displaced anger is
also common in our political life. We see it in this generation of
young white men without much education and very little future. This
economy no longer has a place for them. The corporations have moved
their jobs to Singapore. Unfortunately, it is Limbaugh and the
Republicans who are addressing the resentments of these folks, and
aiming their anger in the wrong direction.

In my state, I have not seen so much hatred in politics since the
heyday of the John Birch Society in the early 1960s. Used to be you
couldn't talk politics with a conservative without his getting all
red in the face, arteries standing out in his neck, wattles aquiver
with indignation -- just like a pissed-off turkey gobbler. And now
we're seeing the same kind of anger again.

Martin Longman: Waning Power for Blacks and Democrats: No coincidence
that 2014 was the first election without the Voting Rights Act to protect
black voters in the Old South. The Republicans have put a lot of effort
into eradicating white Democratic office holders in the South, no matter
how little ideological difference they present. The effect is reduce
visible Democratic office holders to the black minority, reinforcing
the Republican brand as the White People's Party. Whether they've done
this because they are racists or just because it's a winning strategy,
the effect is to prolong racism in the South and elsewhere. Assuming
Landrieu is toast, the only Democratic senator in the old confederate
states are in outliers Virginia and Florida, and neither is easy.

There's no point in sugar-coating this. In the Deep South, the Democratic
Party is now the non-white party, and minority politicians don't have the
white partners they need to exercise any but the most local political
power. While the problem is less severe in the border states, it has
clearly made advances there. You can look at pretty much the whole
Scots-Irish migration from the Virginias to Oklahoma and see that the
Democrats were trounced last Tuesday. They badly lost Senate elections
in West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, and Arkansas,
and they actually lost two Senate elections each in South Carolina and
Oklahoma. Their seat in Virginia was only (just barely) saved by the
DC suburbs in the northeastern part of the state.

Longman also has a detailed piece on the House elections,
The Midterm Results Were Not Completely Preordained, if you're
still interested. If not, you might consider this paragraph -- one
recipe for an exceptionally low turnout is the media message that
these elections didn't matter:

Regardless, you can say that your models predicted a big night for the
Republicans all you want, but I still blame the media. I blame the media
for creating the first federal election season in my lifetime in which
the elections weren't the top story for the last two months of the
campaign. By focusing so heavily on other stories, like ISIS and the
Ebola virus, the media smothered the Democratic message.

Wendy R Weiser: How Much of a Difference Did New Voting Restrictions Make
in Yesterday's Close Races?: The 2014 election was the first one run
without the protections of the Voting Rights Act. It was also the first
midterm election run under a spate of new voter suppression laws ushered
in by Republicans after 2010 to keep turnout low. Weiser cites close
election cases in North Carolina, Kansas, Virginia, and Florida, with
various studies showing 2-3% drops due to new laws. "Under Florida's
law, the harshest in the country, one in three African-American men is
essentially permanently disenfranchised." Weiser also points out that
while the Texas governorship was decided by more than "the 600,000
registered voters in Texas who could not vote this year because they
lack IDs the state will accept" those citizens' inability to vote has
an effect up and down the ticket, and indeed makes it that much harder
for Democrats to run candidates. One thing that's rarely commented
upon is that voter restriction laws not only prevent some people from
exercising their voting rights, they intimidate many more from even
trying.

Q&A: James K Galbraith on the Myth of Petpetual Growth, How Language
Shapes Economic Thought, and More: An interview with Galbraith,
whose new book, The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future
of Growth is next on my reading list. Galbraith seems to doubt
Ryan Cooper's argument that we need to counter inequality to increase
growth. I've long agreed with Cooper (and Stiglitz, but not Krugman)
that inequality is depressing demand at least in the US, but Galbraith
seems to be arguing that growth is being hampered by more than just
inequality -- e.g., that technology has something to do with it. One
thing I'm pretty sure of is that technological advances have done
much to blunt the political impact of inequality -- in effect, big
TVs and smart cell phones make us less bitter about the rich getting
richer. The new book is certain to be interesting. I've said many
times that Galbraith's The Predator State: How Conservatives
Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too is the
best political book of the last decade.

Mike Konczal/Bryce Covert: The Real Solution to Wealth Equality:
"Instead of just giving people more purchasing power, we should be
taking basic needs off the market altogether." Social Security does
this. So would universal healthcare and free education. Konczal and
Covert have expanded this into a regular column in The Nation.
All of these are worth reading:

Why Prisons Thrive Even When Budgets Shrink [10/13]: "The necessary
agenda -- from stopping the "war on drugs" to rejecting carceral force as our
first response to social problems -- requires not investing more in the
existing criminal-justice system, but simply doing less."

Does the Minimum Wage Kill Jobs? [10-27]: "Even this year, the thirteen
states that raised their minimum wages on January 1 have experienced higher
employment growth than those that didn't."

The Latest Debate Over Taxing the Rich Misses One Crucial Fact [11/17]:
"Progressives have forgotten that taxes do more than just raise money."
Bonus quote: "High inheritance taxes don't just prevent plutocracies
from forming; they also encourage the rich to donate to civil society,
directing private riches toward culture, education and charity."

Peter Van Buren: What Could Possibly Go Right? Iraq War 3.0, he calls
it. Ignoring 1.0, I'm reminded more of Marx's quip about the Bonapartes:
history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce -- although for
all concerned it'll look more like tragedy all over again: it's only from
an insensitive distance that one can sit back and revel in how ridiculous
everyone involved is.

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

Got up this morning. The sky was clear, the air crisp, a really lovely
day. People went to work. Some drove by. Others walked their dogs. The
mail came. It all seems like a normal day. The ramifications of yesterday's
elections will take some time to manifest themselves. It occurs to me that
maybe I shouldn't fret so much. I'm 64. By the time the Republicans destroy
Obamacare I'll be 65 and eligible for Medicare. By the time they kill
off Medicare, I'll be dead. And otherwise I'm relatively immune to the
scourges of Republican rule: I don't need decent or affordable schools,
I'm unlikely to be harrassed by police or criminals (and the odds of a
self-righteous gun nut striking me aren't much higher than the odds of
being struck by lightning or mowed down by a tornado). I'm out of the
job market, but (for now at least) don't need welfare either. And I
don't have children, so while I wish good things for generations to
come I don't have much skin in that game. If other Americans don't
care what happens to them, why should I?

What happened? Nate Silver's postmortem claims
The Polls Were Skewed Toward Democrats. I wish he had phrased this
differently: the takeaway is likely to be that the pollsters were biased,
something Republicans are always whining about (although Democrats usually
suspect the opposite). Other reasons are possible: late shifts, volatile
voter turnout levels. Pollsters try to limit their samples to "likely
voters" but that can be hard to guess ahead of the fact. I don't have
much data on turnout so far, but accepting the premise that people who
don't vote are generally more liberal than people who do -- there's
quite a bit of evidence for that -- a Democratic vote shortfall suggests
a lower-than-expected turnout.[1] One turnout figure I have is Sedgwick
County in KS (Wichita), where turnout was 51.5% -- actually a bit less
than in 2010, despite much more competitive races this year. I suspect
a variation on the so-called Bradley Effect (where people tell pollsters
something that sounds better than the truth): I suspect more people told
pollsters they would vote than actually did.

Silver's data shows that Republican Senate candidates did better
than their weighted poll averages in 26 (of 34) races (he leaves KS
off the list; Orman ran as an independent, but everyone treated him
as a Democrat, especially since the Democratic nominee dropped out
and wasn't on the ballot); Republican Gubernatorial candidates did
better in 28 (of 35) races. Had the polls been right, the Democrats
would have won two Senate seats (North Carolina, Alaska) and four
governorships (Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland) they lost, but
they would have lost Connecticut. Had the Democrats run two points
better than their polls, they would have saved or picked up three
Senate seats (Colorado, Georgia, Iowa) and three governships (Maine,
Michigan, Wisconsin). That would have turned into a decent night.

Still, polling wasn't the reason Republicans won. I hadn't taken
it that seriously, but the main reason's been staring me in the face
every time I visited
Talking Points Memo: in
their "PollTracker" Obama has had a steady job approval rating of
42.9%, ten points below is 52.9% disapproval. That number hasn't
budged in months, and it's hard to imagine what Obama could do to
move it. He can't legislate anything without help from Congress,
and that's something the Republicans won't permit. He could, like
Harry Truman when faced a Republian-controlled Congress in 1948, go
out on the campaign trail and attack his "do-nothing Congress," but
that's not his style (and anyway, he's not up for election). Nor
does he really have much to talk about: the economy is recovering
but it's not doing most people much good (nor did he do it much good);
he has positive stories on issues ranging from domestic oil surpluses
to reducing the national debt, but who cares?; he's managed to get
back into Iraq and involved in Syria without having a clue where
that's going; then there's the panic on Ebola, where the message is
a boring we're doing what needs to be done. The quiet competency
and subtle nudges he's always aimed for don't move anyone.

The rest of TPM's widget doesn't look so bad for Democrats: their
unfavorable rating is 8 point higher than their favorable (46-38),
but the Republicans are 20 points unfavorable (50-30). One troubling
point is that even though Republicans are less liked and more loathed
voters still give them a +2.4% (45.7% to 43.3%) edge in the generic
congressional ballot (plus, in the House, they have more incumbents
due mostly to gerrymandering). One reason I dismissed the top line
is that some people, like me, disapprove of Obama but wouldn't think
of defecting to the Republicans over it. (My main gripe is Obama's
handling of what I call the Four Wars of 2014 -- Syria, Iraq, Gaza,
and Ukraine.) But evidently there aren't many of us. On the other
hand, in race after race Republicans figure all they have to do is
to identify the Democrat (or in Kansas, independent Greg Orman) with
Obama and voters will snap. I expected most people to see through
something that transparent, but for various reasons (including but
not limited to racism) lots of people are ready to blame Obama for
whatever bugs them, no matter what. And a big chunk of the $3.6
billion spent on the campaign went into driving that one point home.

Matt Yglesias explained what's been happening in a post on Mitch
McConnell's reëlection:

In the winter of 2008-2009, the leaders of the Obama transition
effort had a theory as to how things would go and mainstream
Washington agreed with them.

The theory went like this. With large majorities in the House and
Senate, it was obvious that lots of Democratic bills would pass. But
the White House would be generous and make concessions to Republicans
who were willing to leap on the bandwagon. Consequently, incumbent
Republicans from states Obama won (Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, North
Carolina, Indiana, Nevada) would be eager to cut deals in which they
backed Obama bills in exchange for key concessions. With that process
under way, many Republicans who weren't even that vulnerable would be
eager to cut deals as well, in search of a piece of the action. As a
result, bills would pass the Senate with large 70- to 75-vote
majorities, and Obama would be seen as the game-changing president who
healed American politics and got things done.

McConnell's counter plan was to prevent those deals. As McConnell
told Josh Green, the key to eroding Obama's popularity was denying him
the sheen of bipartisanship, and that meant keep Republicans united in
opposition:

"Reporters underestimate how powerful the calendar is," says Jim
Manley, the former communications director for Harry Reid, the
Democratic Senate leader. "Say you want to break a filibuster. On
Monday, you file cloture on a motion to proceed for a vote on
Wednesday. Assuming you get it, your opponents are allowed 30 hours of
debate post-cloture on the motion to proceed. That takes you to
Friday, and doesn't cover amendments. The following Monday you file
cloture on the bill itself, vote Wednesday, then 30 more hours of
debate, and suddenly two weeks have gone by, for something that's not
even controversial." All of this has slowed Senate business to a
crawl.

"We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these
proposals," McConnell says. "Because we thought -- correctly, I think --
that the only way the American people would know that a great debate
was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang
the 'bipartisan' tag on something, the perception is that differences
have been worked out, and there's a broad agreement that that's the
way forward."

To prevent Obama from becoming the hero who fixed Washington,
McConnell decided to break it. And it worked. Six years into the
affair, we now take it for granted that nothing will pass on a
bipartisan basis, no appointment will go through smoothly, and
everything the administration tries to get done will take the form of
a controversial use of executive power.

It's been ugly. But in most voters' mind, the ugliness has attached
to Obama and, by extension, Democrats.

Anyone who's paid much attention is aware of Republican obstruction
and hostage taking -- some approving and some aghast -- but many don't
notice until it's too late, and it's easy for them to blame Obama,
especially with the right-wing media attacking Obama for pretty much
everything they can imagine. The one exception that reflects back on
Republicans seems to be shutting down the government, but folks rarely
notice when the safety net is shredded until they fall through and go
splat. Similarly, who notices when jobs (e.g., judges and ambassadors)
go unfilled as long as they don't affect you personally. But the idea
isn't just to obstruct Obama, it's to make life so difficult that the
Democrats don't even try to do new things -- and that has the effect
of making Obama and the Democrats look ineffective, like they aren't
even trying.

What McConnell and the Republicans have done isn't unprecedented --
indeed they did much the same thing to Clinton -- except in frequency
and persistence: there's never been anything quite like that before.
The Senate, in particular, has many arcane rules ripe for abuse, and
only limited by conscience -- something rarely seen among a group who
increasingly favor incompetent and unrepresentative government. Like
most schemes, the only way around it is to cut through it, exposing
the ill intent and holding all sides to a higher standard of public
interest. One might expect the mainstream media to do just that, but
their sense of even-handedness blinds them to asymmetric behavior.
Nor does it help that the media are held by large corporations, not
the public trust (an idea increasingly regarded as quaint).

I'm not interested in speculating on what Obama can or cannot, should
or should not do during the last two years of his term. I will say that
the Democratic Party needs a spokesman independent of the White House,
and that they need to rebuild the party from the roots up, much like the
Republicans did in the early 1990s. Obama blew his opportunity to get
much done when he lost Congress in 2010, much as Clinton did in 1994.
That plus eight much-worse-than-wasted years with GW Bush has left us
with an increasing roll of problems, little wherewithal to solve them,
and it seems even less imagination. Until the latter opens up, we're
stuck in this hopeless game, where nothing is possible because nothing
viable can be imagined. In this, I'd say the Democrats are as blind
as the Republicans, albeit somewhat less cynical.

It's worth noting that nearly all of the actual issues on the various
ballots were won by progressives, including a higher minimum wage in
Arkansas, more thorough gun control checks in Washington, guaranteed
sick leave in several states, and decriminalization of marijuana. (A
medical marijuana initiative in Florida lost when it fell just short
of a 60% supermajority requirement, after Sheldon Adelson spent millions
against it.) Perhaps more Democrats should have run on issues, instead
of shying away from them. It's been observed that the election results
will most likely end medicare expansion in Arkansas, Kentucky, and West
Virginia, but that's due to Republican gains, not to referenda on the
issue. Indeed, it's doubtful most voters in those states realize what
they've done. All they think they've done is to have thwarted Obama
and his nefarious plots.

[1] Indeed, the first turnout numbers show
Preliminary Turnout Numbers Are Way Down From 2010 and 2012, the
overall percentage voting dropping from 40.9% in 2010 to 36.6% in 2014.
(The presidential elections Obama won in 2008 and 2012 drew 56.8% and
53.6% respectively.) Turnout varied from 59.3% in Maine to 28.5% in
Texas; Kansas was 42.8%. Although the bottom of the barrel was solid
red (Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Oklahoma), some Democratic-leaning
states had low turnouts (New York: 30.2%; California: 34.8%). I think
there are at least two factors here: there is an underlying variation
by state (e.g., Minnesota, which ranked 5th this year, is usually near
the top, while Texas is almost always at the bottom), which are then
tweaked somewhat by having competitive races.

There is also a map which compares 2014 to 2010. States with higher
turnout in 2014 are: Nebraska (+7.6), Louisiana, Wisconsin, Maine,
Arkansas, Alaska, New Hampshire (+3.1). Kansas was +1.1, a pretty
small gain compared to campaign spending (through the roof). Colorado
was +1.8, Kentucky +1.8, North Carolina +1.5, Florida +1.4.

Comparing yesterday's exit polls to those of 2012, the first thing
that jumps out at you is a big shift in age demographics: under-30
voters dropped from 19 percent of the electorate in 2012 to 13 percent
in 2014, while over-65 voters climbed from 16 percent in 2012 to 22
percent in 2014. That's quite close to the age demographics of
2010.

[2] By the way, here's a report on Kansas:
How the Kansas Democratic Party Drove Itself to Near Extinction (Pt 1):
I can't really vouch for this -- I know some people who are active in the
party, but I'm not one of them -- but certainly the lack of organization,
offices, and candidate support is a big problem here. The Democrat who
ran for an empty Senate seat against Jerry Moran did so with a total
budget of about $23,000 (vs. about $5 million, if memory serves). This
makes me wonder whether the Democratic gubernatorial ticket this year
would have been stronger with Jill Docking on top and Davis slotted
for Lieutenant Governor. For one thing, Docking wouldn't have been
characterized as a "Lawrence liberal" (she's from Wichita), nor would
she have been subject to those lurid "strip club" ads. Women have a
good track record in KS politics: the last two Democratic governors
were women, and before that two previous Democratic governors were
named Docking (Jill married into a rather famous family, as by the
way did Kathleen Sebelius).
Also see
Pt. 2.

Daily Log

I've made this point repeatedly in my blog, but in the wake of
yesterday's election fiasco, let's make sure you hear it: the biggest
political mistake Obama made was to get rid of Howard Dean as chairman
of the Democratic Party. It's time to bring Dean back and rebuild the
party from the bottom up, across all fifty states. Also to provide a
party spokesman who can speak up for the party rank-and-file -- the
people who voted for Clinton and Obama and were forgotten as soon as
inauguration day came around.

I'm from Kansas, and we worked very hard this year to throw off the
Republican yoke. After all, we know better than most how bad it can
get. In 2006, with help from Dean, we elected a Democratic governor
and two (of four) US Representatives. Then Obama wrote Kansas off in
2008.

Billmon did one of his multipart tweet things. I thought I'd try to
straighten it out (to see if it makes any sense):

You already know next few days will see MSM reading last rites for
Dems & predicting 1000 year GOP Reich. So some perspective is needed.

I'm definitely not the right guy to be looking for silver linings,
especially for Democratic Party, which is essentially useless.

But only interesting thing about 2014 election (2 me) was what it
showed about continuing decline of GOP's white conservative voting base.

Haven't seen final numbers, but looks like electorate was considerably
whiter & RW than 2012, but less than 2010. About what you'd expect.

Results probably also about what you'd expect: GOP year, magnified
by strong Red State lean of 2014 Senate class. But lots of narrow wins.

Year this reminds of most (ironically) is 1986, when Dems retook
Senate by beating bunch of GOPers elected in 1980 Reagan wave.

Also lots of relatively tight races in 1986 -- but most of them
tilted to the Dems at the end, like they fell to the GOP this year.

Much excitement among Dems after '86 victories, much talk party was
emerging from shadow of Reagan & 1984 landslide. Rising hopes for '88.

Music Week

Week didn't start until Wednesday, when I posted last Music Week,
so the rate count rate was exceptionally high -- 30 is a very solid
7-day week, ridiculous for a 5-day week. Played a lot of new stuff
on Rhapsody, including a couple records I had acquainted myself with
on the road. While the top-rated records all got multiple spins, I
didn't dawdle on the clear misses (other than Dan Weiss favorite
Ex Hex).

I've especially been missing the recommendations of Jason Gubbels,
so was glad to see his
Third Quarter 2014 Wrap-Up -- really just a cribsheet. He tabs
five records as "pretty great": Run the Jewels, Angaleena Presley,
Leonard Cohen, Spider Bags, and Aphex Twin. I had three of those,
but "ran the jewels" way too fast a week back to get any real feel
for the record, not that I didn't like what I heard [**]. I gave
Spider Bags another play: I probably have it too low [*], but not
so much so that I felt compelled to regrade it. I only know about
half of the "pretty goods" (including Elio Villafranca and Changari
below), but only have Orlando Julius' Jaiyede Afro at A-.
No major disagreements below that, although the "pretty meh" Bill
Frisell was well received by my friends on the Cape (I wound up at
[***]), and I dislike Jason Moran's All Rise more than my
grade [*] suggests.

Thought I noticed a blip in B+(**) grades this week, so I went
to the year-in-progress file
to check. I assumed B+ grades would be evenly distributed, but
there is a small bell curve in the middle: 168-185-162. Actually,
that bump was much more pronounced last year: 222-318-262. And
now that I think about it last year's distribution makes more
sense: there should be fewer higher-rated records than lower,
but my actual lower-rated counts are progressively attenuated
as we get ever deeper into records I don't consider prospects.
Consider this sequence, comparing this year's count-per-grade to
last year's: [A-] 68.7%, [***] 75.6%, [**] 58.1%, [*] 61.8%,
[B] 52.9%, [B-] 76.9%. The way I read this, I'm listening to
less crap this year -- probably because I don't have the
metacritic file to make me conscious of lousy records other
people like.

By the way, adding up all these numbers shows I only have
64.2% as many records in the 2014 (738) file as in 2013 (1149
and still growing until I freeze it end of December). It seems
unlikely I'll ever make that deficit up (although 1000 is
probably a 50-50 proposition).

Get out and vote tomorrow. It's the only day of the year when
you get to act like you live in a democracy, even though your choices
aren't likely to amount to much and the powers-that-be have done all
they could to rig the results. Also the day you can blame your fellow
citizens for their foolish choices, as opposed to every other day
when the problem is more likely to be the corruption of the system.

New records rated this week:

Allo Darlin': We Came From the Same Place (2014, Slumberland): I don't follow lyrics well enough to be sure these are as deep as they might be [r]: A-

Weekend Roundup

Tuesday is election day. Six years ago Barack Obama was elected
president with 69 million votes -- 52.9% of the 132 million voters
(56.8 of the voting-age population, the highest share since 1968) --
and the Democrats swept both houses of Congress, even achieving what
was widely touted as a "fillibuster-proof Senate" (not that I can
recall them breaking any fillibusters with narrow partisan votes,
aside from the ACA health care reform). Almost immediately, right
wing talk radio exploded with hatred for Obama and the Democrats,
and the Republican members of Congress turned into intransigent and
remarkably effective obstructionists.

Meanwhile, Obama quickly pivoted from promising to change Washington
to doing whatever he could to salvage the status quo, starting with the
banks that had crashed the economy and Bush's military misadventures in
the Middle East. Instead of using his congressional majorities, he plead
for bipartisan support, often compromising before he even introduced a
plan -- as when he sandbagged his own stimulus program by saddling it
with ineffective tax cuts, or introduced health care reform and global
warming proposals that were originally hatched in right-wing think
tanks. He gave the incumbent Republican Federal Reserve chair an extra
term, and he kept on the incumbent Republican Secretary of Defense --
and both screwed him in short form. Moreover, like Bill Clinton when
he won in 1992, Obama dismantled a successful national Democratic Party
leadership and replaced them with cronies who promptly threw the 2010
congressional election.

The 2010 elections rival 1946 as one of the dumbest things the
American people ever did. The Republicans took over the House, not
only ending any prospect of progressive legislation but constantly
threatening to shut down the federal government. Republicans also
took over many governorships and state houses, and used those power
bases to consolidate their power: by gerrymandering districts, and
by passing laws to make it harder to vote. It turns out that the
difference between 2008 and 2010 was not just a matter of Republican
enthusiasm and Democratic lethargy: it registered as a massive drop
in the number of voters, from 132 million to 90 million, from 56.8%
of voting-age population to 37.8%
(link;
note also that the 2006 turnout was only 37.1% and that produced
a Democratic landslide, so it's somewhat variable who stays home).

In 2012, when Obama finally took a personal interest in an election,
he was again able to get out the vote (albeit still a bit off from 2008
with 130 million, 53.6%). Obama won again, the Democrats increased their
share of the Senate, and won a majority of the vote for the House (but
not a majority of seats, thanks to all that gerrymandering, so the last
two years have seen the same level of obstruction as the previous two).
If those trends hold, turnout will be down again this year, and that
will give the elite-favoring Republicans an edge: at this point, nobody
expects them to lose the House, and most "experts" expect the Republicans
to gain control of the Senate. That would be a horrific outcome, which
makes you wonder why the Democrats don't seem to be taking it seriously,
and more generally why the press doesn't talk about it as anything but
a horserace. That trope suggests a race between two more-or-less equals,
horses, whereas the actual race is between predator and prey: if the
Democrat is a horse, the Republican is more like a lion, or a pack of
wolves (or an army of flesh-eating ants). The Republicans don't back off
when a Democrat wins a race. They don't socialize, and don't compromise.
They keep attacking, figuring that no matter how much damage they do,
the public will blame the incumbent.

An old, but not outdated, Crowson cartoon

It's a long story how the Republicans have gotten to be the menace
they currently are -- one I can't go into with any hope of posting
today. Suffice it to say they've managed to combine three threads:

Their single substantial political position is to help the rich grow
richer, a position that has hardened even as business has become more
predatory -- indeed, their individualist, "greed is good" ideology has
hardened into self-destructive dogma.

Since anti-populism is an inherently losing strategy in a democracy,
they've built a diverse base by cultivating "single issue voters" --
especially ones who can be focused to hate proxy groups (including those
so-called "cultural elites," but mostly the non-white, the poor, single
women, deviants, peaceniks, policy wonks, anyone who doesn't like guns).

I know that this sounds like a recipe for disaster, and indeed every
time the Republicans have tried to put their ideas into practice they
have backfired. (Reagan got away relatively free although his S&L
deregulation disaster was a harbinger of things to come, and his arming
of the mujahideen in Afghanistan still haunts us. But the Bushes plunged
us into endless, bankrupting war, and the latter's laissez-faire bank
policy wrecked the economy, while Katrina exposed the moral rot caused
by Bush's privatization of government services. And right now Kansas is
reeling from Gov. Brownback's "experiments" -- they say that "absolute
power corrupts absolutely," and the total hammerlock of the RINO-purged
ultra-right party in the Sunflower State offers further proof.) Yet
much of the country, led by the fawning mainstream media, continues to
accord Republicans a measure of respect they've done nothing to earn.
For while the Republicans could care less about destroying the social
fabric of the nation, they are always careful to honor the rich, their
businesses, the military, the nation's self-important legacy, and, of
course, almighty God -- their idea of the natural order of things,
one no Democrat politician dare challenge. (Indeed, the Democrats'
cheerleader-in-chief for those verities has been Barack Obama --
the very man most Republicans insist is the root of all evil.)

When the dust settles the amount of money spent on this election
will be staggering, not that many people will move on to the next
obvious question: since businessmen always seek profits, what sort
of return do the rich expect from their largesse? Thanks to modern
technology -- caller ID to screen calls and a DVR to skip through
commercials -- we've managed to avoid most of the deluge, but I've
managed to catch enough to get a sense of how bad unlimited campaign
spending has become. Kansas and Arkansas both have competitive races
for Governor and Senator, and in both cases the Republicans, with
their sense of entitlement, have pulled out all the stops. However,
their commercials are one-note attacks on Obama, as if that's the
magic word that boils voters' blood.

That acrimony is hard to fathom: a combination of prejudice and
ignorance and, well, gullibility if not downright stupidity. For
anyone who's paid the least bit of attention over the last six years,
Obama is a very cautious, inherently conservative politician -- one
who goes out of his way not to ruffle feathers, least of all of the
rich and powerful. Indeed, that makes perfect sense: all his life
he's strove to conform to the powers that exist, and he's been so
adept at it that he's been richly rewarded for his service. The idea
that he's surreptitiously out to destroy the country that so flattered
him by making him president is beyond ridiculous, yet judging from
their cynical ads, Republicans don't just believe this -- they take
it as something so obvious they need merely to repeat it. And that's
just one of many cases where the Republicans think they can simply
talk their way out of reality.

It is quite fashionable among Washington elite types to insist that
we would have had another depression if we didn't save the Wall Street
banks, but do any of them have any idea what they mean by this?

The first Great Depression was the result of not having enough
demand in the economy. We got out of it finally in 1941 by spending
lots of money. The motivation for spending lots of money was fighting
World War II, but the key point was spending the money. It might have
been difficult politically to justify the spending necessary to
restore the economy to full employment without the war, but that
is a political problem not an economic problem. We do know how to
spend money.

In effect, the pundits who say that we would have had a depression
if we did not bail out the banks are saying that our economic policy
is so dominated by flat-earth types that we would have to endure a
decade or more of double-digit unemployment, with the incredible
amount of suffering it would cause, because the flat-earthers would
not allow the spending necessary to restore full employment.

That characterization of our political process could be accurate,
but it is important to be clear what is being said. The claim is not
that anything about the financial crisis itself would have caused a
depression. The claim is rather that Washington economic policy is
totally controlled by people without a clue about economics.

In fact, let's repeat it again. One of the most basic things we
know from macroeconomics is that government can restore a depressed
economy to full employment by sufficiently increasing spending, and
that if the depression is caused by insufficient demand, government
spending is the only way that works. We know that this depression
is due to insufficient demand because businesses are sitting on cash
instead of investing in more capacity, and giving them more money
doesn't change a thing. So the only way to bring employment is for
government to spend more, and there are several obvious benefits to
that. For one thing, investments in infrastructure pay dividends
well into the future, and they are never cheaper than during a
depression. That's also true of investments in "human capital" --
education, science, engineering, the arts. But even plain transfers
are a plus, as they move money from people who have more than they
spend to people who need to spend more. One obvious thing to do
when the housing bubble burst was to make it possible to refinance
mortgages -- it would have helped banks clean up their balance
sheets and it would have help people hang onto their homes -- but
it wasn't done, for purely political reasons.

In fact, virtually none of this was done, again for political
reasons -- and that mostly means because of Republican obstruction
(although in states with Republicans in power, like Kansas, they
did considerably worse). Of course, the Democrats weren't too sharp
here either. Obama's belief in "the confidence fairy" was so strong
that he spent his first two years insisting that the economy was in
better shape than it was, foolishly believing that business would
believe him (and not their own accountants) and stop deleveraging.
By the time he realized that wasn't working: he had missed the
opportunity to blame the whole mess on Bush, he had settled for
a stimulus bill way too small, he missed the opportunity to unwind
the Bush tax cuts for the rich (and therefore found himself in a
gaping deficit hole), and then he stupidly bought into the argument
that deficit reduction was more important than cutting unemployment.
It's easy enough to see why the Republicans didn't mind sandbagging
the economy: it weakened labor markets, scarcely touched monopoly
profits, reduced government (and the possibility that government
might do something for the people), and in the end people would
blame Obama anyway. It's harder to understand why Obama inflicted
all this misery on himself, his party, and his voters.

Forty years ago all this was common sense -- so much so that
Richard Nixon proclaimed, "We are all Keynesians now." But the US
was more of a democracy then, and the economic effects of government
were more clearly seen for what they were. Nixon was a Keynesian
because he wanted to get reëlected, and that was what worked. With
Obama, you have to wonder.

Henry Farrell: Big Brother's Liberal Friends: "Sean Wilentz, George
Packer and Michael Kinsley are a dismal advertisement for the current
state of mainstream liberal thought in America. They have systematically
misrepresented and misunderstood Edward Snowden and the NSA." Intellectuals
like those three, who spend [at least] as much time trying to separate
themselves from the left as they invest in their proclaimed liberalism,
are why I felt such contempt for liberals during the Vietnam War (and
its broader Cold War context).

Why do national-security liberals have such a hard time thinking straight
about Greenwald, Snowden and the politics of leaks? One reason is sheer
laziness. National-security liberals have always defined themselves against
their antagonists, and especially their left-wing antagonists. They have
seen themselves as the decent Left, willing to deploy American power to
make the world a happier place, and fighting the good fight against the
knee-jerk anti-Americans.

This creates a nearly irresistible temptation: to see Greenwald, Snowden
and the problems they raise as antique bugbears in modern dress. Wilentz
intimates that Greenwald is plotting to create a United Front of
anti-imperialist left-wingers, libertarians and isolationist
paleoconservatives. Packer depicts Greenwald and Snowden as stalwarts of
the old Thoreauvian tradition of sanctimonious absolutism and moral idiocy.
Kinsley paints Snowden as a conspiracy-minded dupe and Greenwald as a
frustrated Jacobin.

Yet laziness is only half the problem. A fundamental inability to
comprehend Greenwald and Snowden's case, let alone to argue against it,
is the other half. National-security liberals have enormous intellectual
difficulties understanding the new politics of surveillance, because
these politics are undermining the foundations of their worldview.

I suspect that part of that worldview is a desire to see themselves
as part of the security state, something they project as having their
own morality, even though there is no evidence of such. This makes
them defensive when confronted with an outsider like Greenwald or a
turncoat like Snowden. It also makes them gullible to campaigns like
the Bush snow job on invading Iraq: their sense of belonging with the
state isolates them from adverse consequences to others, even while
they justify their acts by pointing to supposed benefits to others
(whom I doubt they are actually capable of relating to).

Another quote:

Snowden and Greenwald suggest that this project is not only doomed but
also corrupt. The burgeoning of the surveillance state in the United
States and its allies is leading not to the international spread of
liberalism, but rather to its hollowing out in the core Western
democracies. Accountability is escaping into a realm of secret
decisions and shadowy forms of cross-national cooperation and
connivance. As Princeton constitutional scholar Kim Lane Scheppele
argues, international law no longer supports national constitutional
rights so much as it undermines them. U.S. efforts to promote
surveillance are hurting civil liberties at home as well as abroad,
as practices more commonly associated with international espionage
are redeployed domestically, and as security agencies (pursuing what
they perceive as legitimate goals) arbitrage the commingling of
domestic and international data to gather information that they
should not be entitled to.

Thomas Frank: Righteous rage, impotent fury: the last days of Sam Brownback
and Pat Roberts: I'm still skeptical that Brownback and Roberts will
fall on Tuesday, but he's right that it's close, and that it's notable in
a year when so much of the conventional wisdom expects Republican gains.
It's worth noting that Brownback and Roberts got to this point by two
very different routes, but they're likely to fall for the same reasons.
Six years ago Roberts was cruising to an easy third term, and Brownback
was up in Iowa campaigning for president. Brownback fizzled embarrassingly,
losing the caucuses not just to Mike Huckabee -- his rival for the pious
church crowd -- but to everyone else as well. He then decided to burnish
his credentials with some executive experience, so he gave up his own
safe senate seat in 2010 to run for governor. He won easily, then set
out to establish his presidential bona fides by overhauling everything
in state government to meet state-of-the-art Republican standards. He
was, after all, convinced that his ideology worked, and meant to run
not just on theory but on proven success. For starters, he had Kansas
hire the memorably named Arthur Laffer to come up with a tax proposal:
one that eliminated all state income taxes for "small business" owners,
which in Kansas includes billionaires like Charles Koch. Laffer assured
us that the taxes would be a "shot of adrenaline" straight into the
Kansas economy. The only effect they had was to blow a monster hole
in the state budget, which led to cutbacks all across the state, which
. . . stalled the economy. With Republicans controlling both houses
of the state legislature, Brownback had no trouble getting his
"experiments" approved, but in 2012 he didn't like the occasional
no vote from the few remaining moderate Republicans, so he arranged
a purge of the so-called RINOs -- pushing the legislature even more
to the right. Resistance against Brownback has been growing almost
since the day he took office. The taxes are just one of dozens of
issues Brownback has been offensive on, ranging from fanciful new
restrictions against abortion providers to a campaign to exterminate
the lesser prairie chicken (before the federal government can declare
it an "endangered species" -- some kind of inconvenience to ranchers).

Roberts, on the other hand, had nothing to fear but fear itself,
but being the very definition of chickenshit, when the tea partyfolk
started questioning his fanaticism he lurched suddenly to the right,
even going so far as to vote against the Agriculture bill most Kansas
farming corporations depend on. He barely escaped a primary where he
was tagged as "liberal in Washington, rarely in Kansas" (indeed, he
had to fire a campaign manager who told the press that Roberts had
"gone home to Virginia"). And then when he assumed that he'd have no
trouble with whoever the Democrats nominated, he wound up facing a
well-to-do independent, Greg Orman, with the Democrat bowing out.
Since then, his campaign commercials have never risen above the level
of trying to equate Orman with Obama and Harry Reid. Orman's ads also
identify Obama and Reid as problems in Washington, but add Mitch
McConnell and Pat Roberts to the list. Where Brownback is some sort
of true believer in things that clearly don't work, Roberts is a
mere poster boy for the usual run of Washington corruption. Neither
approach is very popular anywhere, but Kansas offers exceptionally
vivid choices.

What Frank doesn't do is take credit for causing this debacle. His
book, What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart
of America (2004) made a big point about how Republicans took
advantage of rank-and-file cultural conservatives, catering to them
with election rhetoric then only implementing business favors once
elected. Since Frank's book came out, the rank-and-file revolted,
and they've pushed their crazy agenda through the legislature --
that's why, for instance, Kansas passed a law to nullify federal
gun laws, and another to allow conceal/carry into all government
office buildings. Under the old pre-Frank scheme, electing far-right
nuts helped the rich get richer but didn't impact many others. Now,
everyone's affected, which is one reason for the backlash. Another
is the purge, which has rallied hundreds of prominent RINOs to
campaign against Brownback.

Stephen M Walt: Netanyahu's Not Chickenshit, the White House Is:
Israeli pawn/propagandist Jeffrey Goldberg quoted an anonymous White
House aid as describing Benjamin Netanyahu as "chickenshit" -- evidently
for not attacking Iran like the Israelis promised Goldberg they'd do --
so the Israelis got worked up into a snit fit and demanded apoligies,
a diplomatic nicety the US didn't bother to demand a few weeks ago
when Naftali Bennett accused John Kerry of anti-semitism. Evidently,
Netanyahu has a very prickly sensibility, whereas we all know that
Obama is used to sloughing off far worse insults. Walt covers the
whole "chickenshit-gate" affair here. I've said a lot of things
about Netanyahu, but I'd never call a politician who wields nuclear
weapons "chickenshit" -- even if he was, I wouldn't dare taunt him.

Actually, I doubt that Netanyahu is that thin-skinned. Rather, he
saw this as an opportunity to remind his supporters how completely
he has Obama under his thumb. When Netanyahu came to power in the
wake of Obama's victory, I figured it would be short order before
his narrow coalition would fall. All the nudge it would take would
be a clear signal from Obama that Netanyahu wasn't someone we could
work with, and that decision wouldn't take long. There even were a
few hints, but nothing Netanyahu couldn't wiggle out of. After a
couple years Obama stopped trying, threw in the towel on settlements,
and he's been Netanyahu's bitch ever since. For more, see
Gideon Levy: Who's the real chickenshit?.

The United States' policy can only be described as "abject cowardice."
Netanyahu, at least, is acting according to his ideology and belief.
Obama is acting against his -- and that's pure cowardice. A captive
of internal politics and a victim of the de-legitimization campaign
in his country, the president didn't have the guts to overcome those
obstacles, follow his world view and bring an end to the occupation.
Yes, he could. Israel is totally dependent on America and he is
America's president. Instead Obama continued the policy of automatic
support for Israel, believing, in vain, that flattery will change
its policy.

Obama was destined to be the game changer in the Middle East.
When he was elected, he ignited the hope that he would do that.
But he preferred to stay with his cowardice. To grovel before
Israel and turn his back on the Palestinians. To talk about peace
and support Israel's built-in violence.

Now, in the winter of his career, he is showing signs of being
fed up with all this. He can still change things, but not with
insults, only with deeds that shake Israel up. Two years are time
enough for an American president to make it clear to Israel that
its corrupt banquet is over. But for that we need a president who
isn't a chickenshit.

Some stupid politics links (from TPM, where it's impossible to
find stories more than two days old, but they carry roughly a dozen
like these every week):

Larry Diamond: Chasing Away the Democracy Blues: It bothers me when
pundits get on their high horse about democracy and use that to dismiss
states with basic democratic institutions that offend them for some other
reason -- usually that they have elected leaders the US doesn't approve
of for one reason or another. Diamond, for instance, doesn't think much
of Russia, Iran, Turkey, or Venezuela, but he likes Ukraine much better
since a coup deposed its last democratically elected president. Of course,
I don't like restrictions on free press like we've seen in Russia and
Turkey recently, nor restrictions on who can run for office like those
practiced in Iran, but few political systems cannot be improved. I'll
add that while I agree with Diamond and virtually everyone else that
China is not a democracy, my impression is that the Chinese government
is more popular and a more effective public servant than the governments
of many nominal democracies. Diamond's US-centric list of democracies --
you don't find Hungary mentioned anywhere, but the antidemocratic laws
recently passed there aimed at perpetuating the power of a right-wing
party look like something ALEC would work up for the Republicans here --
shows widespread decay which a more balanced list might reduce, but
the following paragraph raises an interesting point:

Like many of you who travel widely, I am increasingly alarmed by how
pervasive and corrosive is the worldwide perception -- in both autocracies
and democracies -- that American democracy has become dysfunctional and
is no longer a model worth emulating. Fortunately, there are many possible
models, and most American political scientists never recommended that
emerging democracies copy our own excessively veto-ridden institutions.
Nevertheless the prestige, the desirability, and the momentum of democracy
globally are heavily influenced by perceptions of how it is performing in
its leading examples. If we do not mobilize institutional reforms and
operational innovations to reduce partisan polarization, encourage
moderation and compromise, energize executive functioning, and reduce
the outsized influence of money and special interests in our own politics,
how are we going to be effective in tackling these kinds of challenges
abroad?

Of course, one answer is that maybe we shouldn't -- especially as long
as we seem incapable of distinguishing public interests from the parochial
private interests and imperial hubris that dominate US foreign policy.
Winston Churchill used to quip that democracy was the worst possible form
of government, except for all the rest. I've long thought that the key
virtue of democracy was that it offers a way to remove leaders like
Winston Churchill from power without having to shoot them. Democracy
promises stability even where leadership changes, and stability is
reason enough to want to see democracy propagated throughout the world.
There are, of course, others, like accountability of leaders to subjects,
an essential element of justice, which is in turn essential for the
mutual trust that every modern society requires.

Corey Robin: Jews, Camps, and the Red Cross: Recent research shows
that Israel ran several "detention camps" from 1948 into the 1950s
where they kept Palestinians as prisoners and subjected them to the
usual concentration camp degradations, including forced labor. I'm
not sure if this is news -- Israel has run its gulags as long as I
can recall, so 1948 is a plausible starting date. I've long known
that Israel's military rule regime ran from 1948-67, when it was
dismantled a few months before being reconstituted for the Occupied
Territories. I've been reading Shira Robinson's Citizen Strangers:
Palestinians and the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State,
which covers this period fairly well.

Juliet Schor: Debating the Sharing Economy: A fairly long survey
both of commercial and nonprofit sharing organizations with various
pluses and minuses -- something that is analogous to my Share the
Wealth project but not clear what I want to do. (I suppose the
nonprofits are close to what I have in mind, but my own thoughts are
far from developed.) Schor has a series of interesting books, the
most recent and relevant True Wealth: How and Why Millions of
Americans Are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically-Light, Small-Scale,
High-Satisfaction Economy (2011), which among other things goes
into makerspace technology at great length.